Jul 18 Good morning, RVA: George Mason, housing opportunities, and a master plan

Good morning, RVA! It's 75 °F, and today you know what to expect: highs in the 90s, humidity, and sunshine. Keep an eye on the forecast for this weekend though, because the current outlook says we'll see temperatures over 100 °F!

Water cooler

Fascinating PDFs out of the Richmond School Board last night: A set of proposals for dealing with George Mason Elementary School (PDF). George Mason has risen to the top of the stack (fallen to the bottom of the rubble pile?) of our crumbling school facilities, and School Board members Liz Doerr and Cindy Menz-Erb have put together some recommendations to get students, teachers, and staff out of the unsafe environment immediately—like, for the 2017-2018 school year. Should you doubt the need for immediate action, here's what they (and Interim Superintendent Tommy Kranz) observed on a recent visit to Mason: "boiler is emitting natural gas across from in-use classrooms, one boiler is broken so only 1⁄2 the school receives air conditioning or heating at a time, paint (lead paint?) is flaking from pipes at various places in the building, water is leaking and creating water spots on the ceiling in various locations, bathrooms smell of urine and are in disrepair...the computer lab had flooded the day we visited, and some rooms had broken air conditioning." My uninformed hot take on the list of options in the aforelinked PDF would be to go with option #3. That moves George Mason to Franklin Military and then moves Franklin Military to Community, which seems less disruptive than rezoning Mason students across Woodville, Fairfield, Chimborazo, and Bellevue. The wild thing is that either of those plans costs WAY less ($100k) than just fixing George Mason ($5 million). And remember: This is just one of the major issues facing the school district! Katy Burnell Evans has notes from last night's School Board meeting and some updates on the Memorandum of Understanding with the State (one of the other major issues facing the district). Stay tuned, it's going to be a really interesting year for the new School Board.